New Software-Defined Fabric Leverages White-Box Hardware, Containers

Start-up Kaloom Inc. announced an automated, programmable networking fabric that leverages white-box hardware and containers to virtualize the datacenter.

Called the Kaloom Software Defined Fabric (SDF), the new offering can partition physical datacenters into virtualized instances (vFabric), providing software-defined networking (SDN) advantages such as programmability and agility via self-forming and self-discovery functionality.

It's also designed to use open networking white-box -- or commodity -- hardware to avoid proprietary lock-in, said the company, based in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara) and Montreal.

Networking fabrics have exploded with the SDN movement, offering a new take on network topology. According the TechTarget site, a networking fabric differs from a traditional network: "Network fabric is an industry term that describes a network topology in which components pass data to each other through interconnecting switches. The word fabric is used as a metaphor to illustrate the idea that if someone were to document network components and their relationships on paper, the lines would weave back and forth so densely that the diagram would resemble a woven piece of cloth."

Kaloom said its fabric "is designed for hyperscale, as well as, distributed data centers and targeted to clients in the data center operator, telco, enterprise, cloud, and gaming industries. As a programmable data center fabric, the solution offers integrated routing and switching and enables developers to develop new code to drive innovation and clients to add new services and features in-house. In addition, its programmability avoids vendor lock-in and eliminates the need to wait for silicon upgrades."

The SDF also leverages container technology and works with orchestration systems like as OpenStack (ML2), Kubernetes (CNI) and OpenDaylight (NETCONF).

"Software defined and virtual architectures are key enablers for organizations looking to transform their network and are driving the next wave of network investment," the company quoted Bob Laliberte, practice director and senior analyst for networking at Enterprise Strategy Group, as saying. "Organizations will require higher levels of network automation and programmability to meet the rigorous demands of highly dynamic environments. Additionally, telcos, hyperscalers and multi-data center enterprises are looking to deploy modern, container-based solutions to optimize networking and computing resources. Kaloom's SDF is focused on, and takes advantage of, these key emerging trends."